The Blazing World and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) Read Online Free PDF Page A

inconsiderable reward, for both reader and writer, the text is haunted by the recognition of loss, denial and contingency. The text also attempts a comprehensive survey of the state of knowledge, and a tour of the disciplines, but in doing so repeatedly discovers the precariousness and self-interestedness of all truth-claims.
    The Blazing World
combines a narrative of the effortless rise of a woman to absolute power, with a narrative of the liberty of the female soul and the emancipatory possibilities of Utopian speculation and writing specifically for women. Its first miracle conforms to the romance imperative of virtue rewarded. An anonymous ‘young Lady’ is abducted by a foreign merchant and, as the ship passes from ‘the very end point of the pole of that World, but even to another pole of another world’ ( p. 3 ), owner and crew freeze to death and then ‘thaw, and corrupt’ ( p. 4 ). The merchant’s initial crime against rank, property and propriety is appropriately punished by a fatal crossing between worlds, while the ‘distressed Lady’ is honoured with the highest recognition of her innate merit: ‘the Emperor rejoicing, made her his wife, and gave her an absolute power to rule and govern all that world as she pleased’.
    The sudden metamorphosis of the anonymous young Lady into the Empress of the Blazing World occasions the text’s first extended blazon or catalogue, which is later virtually reproduced at crucial moments in the staging of the Empress’s domestic and imperial power. The description proper of the site of the Blazing World is inaugurated by the introduction of the woman as stranger, but it is she who becomes the most wonderful sight in the Blazing World, a reversal marked by her ritual blazoning and re-presentation as Empress, newly attired in the literally blazing costume of power:
    Her accoutrement after she was made Empress, was as followeth: On her head she wore a cap of pearl, and a half-moon of diamonds just before it; on the top of her crown came spreading over a broad carbuncle, cut in the form of the sun; her coat was of pearl, mixt with blue diamonds, and fringedwith red ones; her buskins and sandals were of green diamonds: in her left hand she held a buckler, to signify the defence of her dominions; which buckler was made of that sort of diamond as has several different colours; and being cut and made in the form of an arch, showed like a rainbow; in her right hand she carried a spear made of white diamond, cut like the tail of a blazing-star, which signified that she was ready to assault those that proved her enemies.( pp. 13–14 )
    Building on the rhetorical centrality of the aristocratic figure of the blazon in her
Blazing World
, Cavendish’s Empress is a kind of hermaphrodized warrior queen, whose representation recalls the cult of Elizabeth I and the masques of Henrietta Maria. 21 In the preface to the
Blazing World
, Cavendish crowns herself ‘Margaret the First’ – ‘though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the First’ – in an ironic trope of the female author’s construction of, and control over, a textual empire, and an imperial narrative: ‘And although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a world of my own.’ In the course of the narrative the Empress succeeds in putting down rebellion both at home and abroad, through a combination of the seductive manipulation of self-image as allegorical display, and a campaign of terror through burning.
    The self-coronation of ‘Margaret the First’ in the preface, partly authorized by the Duke of Newcastle’s commendatory poem which precedes it, is displaced into another more extravagant story of husbandly permission which Cavendish herself calls ‘romancical’. The function of the blazon in this narrative